“The Pony Remark” has an excellent A story and is also notable for what it introduces. This episode features the first appearance of Uncle Leo and the first appearance of Barney Martin as Morty Seinfeld. It is also the first time, I think, that we learn about Jerry’s love of playing softball.

As I’ve written before, Jerry was not very prosperous early in the series, yet in “The Jacket” Jerry buys a suede jacket that he doesn’t discourage George from thinking cost over $1000. The actual price is never revealed but my wife tells me that she thinks was probably around $800. I’ll have to take her word for it.

“The Stock Tip” is the last episode of season one and is the best so far at finding a good balance between two plots, in this case George getting a hot stock tip and Jerry going away for the weekend with Vanessa. Elaine’s plot is that her boyfriend Robert has two cats and she’s very allergic but we are only told about it.

Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David feel like “The Stakeout” is the first episode in which they started to figure out what they could do in the series and I agree. Although there are still no significant plots not involving Jerry, the central incident is great and it also introduces some things that will be revisited in later episodes.

The second episode of Seinfeld looks and sounds like we remember. The theme song is in place, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is in the opening credits. The only odd thing is that the episode title doesn’t start with “The”, and is the only episode in which this is the case.

The first episode is called “The Seinfeld Chronicles”, which was the title of the series for this one episode. When NBC picked it up, the name was changed to Seinfeld. One interesting thing to do when re-watching a series from the beginning is to see how much of what was great about the series was there from the beginning. For example, Everybody Loves Raymond was almost fully formed from the start. Cheers, however, had a pretty good idea of what it would become but it wasn’t quite there. Seinfeld took some time to become Seinfeld.

I can remember what I was doing late night on June 30, 1989. I was watching the Tonight Show and Jay Leno was hosting. That night, one of the guests was comedian Jerry Seinfeld. (I say comedian because at that point that was all I knew about him, that he was a comedian.) Jerry was on to promote his new show that was debuting the following week. That show, of course, was Seinfeld, although at that time it was called The Seinfeld Chronicles. I remember watching the appearance and thinking that Jerry Seinfeld was the type of comedian that appealed to me and that I would watch his show.

Seinfeld sometimes asked us to believe things that didn’t make sense, like in “The Ex-Girlfriend” where George breaks up with a woman who Jerry is attracted to. For one thing, I don’t think the two would have ranges that overlapped to any great extent. Also, would Jerry really want to date a woman who George had broken up with? It seems implausible.